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St. Augustine photographer specializing in families, children, and seniors.

How SEO Can Spice Up Your Business Pt. 1 | St. Augustine Photographer

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization used to be a scary 3 letter word that I rarely said, let alone wanted to learn about. Depending on how long you've been following DBP and the Blog, you may remember that I was blogging daily for like 3 months around Christmas of 2012. I was determined to start showing up on Google, but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn't showing up. No amount of blogging could do it. So I gave up for a while.

Why wasn't I showing up? I was blogging regularly, what was I doing wrong? Everything. I am a member of the Professional Photographers of America and they have a bunch of great online courses you can watch for free. So I did a search, and found there was a 6 part series on SEO. Uggggg. I did NOT want to sit down in my spare time and listen to some boring person talk about website analysis. 6+ hours of this stuff?! But my desire to see change motivated me to sit down every evening and listen to a session a night. It was TOTALLY worth it! I am not only showing up on Google, but as I mentioned yesterday, I'm on page 2 for "St. Augustine Photographer." THAT'S HUGE! I won't be able to write about everything discussed in the classes, but I hope to give you all some helpful hits on how to use SEO for your site to start seeing results.

The first tip is to make sure you know how to control the settings on your blog. If you are lost and confused, do yourself a favor and set aside an afternoon to familiarize yourself with the back end of your site. If you don't know what all your site can do and how to adjust things yourself, your website will suffer. I use Squarespace for my website and it is phenomenal. I would highly recommend them.

Secondly, find out where the title for your website is. Here is a screen shot of what mine looks like. Before my SEO classes, where it asked for Site Title, I had written "Danielle Brooks Photography" After all, that was my site name so that's what needs to go there, right? Wrong. When potential clients look for a photographer, what do you think they Google? Danielle Brooks Photography? Probably, not. But they would Google "St. Augustine Photographer" Google recognizes this on your site and sees "St. Augustine Photographer | Danielle Brooks Photography" as more relevant. Why? Because I am using key words that people are Googleing in my title.

Site description is just as important. You want to essentially use the same exact words in your title but in a different way. So my Site Title is "St. Augustine Photographer | Danielle Brooks Photography | Families Seniors Portraits" And my site description is "Danielle Brooks Photography is a St. Augustine based company founded by family, child and senior photographer Danielle Brooks." My common words are:

Danielle Brooks Photography

St. Augustine Photographer

Family

Senior

Those are all very strong words that Google will pick up on when potential clients search for a photographer. Here is a photo to show how this translates to Google searches.

See how my Site Title and Site Description are laid out? Before I took my SEO classes, I was doing none of this and wasn't showing up on Google, no matter how many pages I looked through. After making this ONE change, I showed up on 14! It is still super far away from Page One, but at least I was showing up!

Hope this helps a little and it wasn't too difficult to learn about SEO. I'll have more for you all on Friday! Stay tuned! And feel free to share my blog with other photographers you know who might need help with this subject.